NetBSD/ofppc: History

January 1995

Contacting various PowerPC machine manufacturers, among them
Motorola Computer Group
and
FirePower (sorry, out of business now)
to get information on their PowerPC machines.
Being redirected by FirePower to EMS group in London,
but this contact wasn't very productive.

August 1995

New contact to FirePower, this time to
Yuri Tsuchitani.
This contact worked much better.
Beginning discussion with Yuri and the development staff at FirePower about
getting technical information on their machines.

October 1995

Ordered a
FirePower MX4100/2.

At the same time started to setup a cross-development environment
on a Sun SPARCstation.

March 1996

First supervisor prompt from NetBSD/powerpc with root/swap mounted via NFS.

April 1996

Ability to boot and mount root/swap from disk.

New /dev/rtc device to read/write the real-time clock.

System runs multiuser, and has completely recompiled itself natively.

May 1996

Booting via NFS supports directory hierarchies and symbolic links.

The bootcode supports booting from ISO9660 filesystems.

June 1996

A generic NetBSD/powerpc kernel can be booted via NFS, from an FFS filesystem,
or from an ISO9660 CD.

July 1996

When getting a Bull Estrella (essentially a Motorola Ultra Board with 603)
with OpenFirmware, it took two days to adapt the port to the new machine.
Most of the work was the addition of the 603 software TLB reload
(for which the example code in the 603 manual is quite buggy).

September 1996

Imported the kernel part of the port into the official
NetBSD
source tree.

Spring 1997

Unfortunately my development machine died.
Since FirePower, after being bought out by Motorola,
no longer is in the business of supporting their old machines,
I'm stuck.
This is the main reason (apart from lack of time) that further
development of NetBSD/powerpc is only crawling.